There are a lot of Wi-Fi or Bluetooth enabled devices out there that can be turned on and off with your smartphone, but there’s no need for your devices to feature Wi-Fi or Bluetooth support if they are using Batthead batteries.

With every generation of smartphone — soon with quad-core superphones — comes bigger screens, faster GPUs and speedier network connections. This quite often results in shorter battery life. Not to mention all the googling, random fact checking, and tweets we’re punching out, battery life is a huge issue.

According to an article by Michael Degusta over at theunderstatement.com, if a Tesla electric car, such as the Roadster is parked unplugged, it will eventually become what the company calls a “brick”. The vehicle can no more be started or even pushed down the road. This is the result of the car’s always-on subsystems which continually feed on the battery.

American researchers at the Rice University in Houston, Texas have created the world’s smallest battery, fabricated with an array of nanowires measuring only 150 nanometres wide — thousands of times smaller than a human hair.

Don’t hold your breath just yet, but in a few years you might be enjoying your first translucent device. After the invention of different see-through electronic components, a new big step ahead has been recently made by Stanford researcher Yi Cui.

Before electric cars can really become a completely viable alternative to the regular gas-powered vehicles on the road, they need to have a way to charge up more quickly. The new 3D film batteries being developed by University of Illinois could be the answer.

Scientists from the Beijing National Laboratory for Molecular Sciences in China were able to coat carbon nanotubes with a nanoporous layer of TiO2 (titanium dioxide) playing a crucial role in the development of new high-capacity batteries.